When I was a writing program administrator, I dealt with plagiarism occasionally. It's a fact of life, but it's rarely something to get wrapped around the axle about. That said, I have something on my mind, and I'm not going to pull any punches with this post. Even if you're not in the field of academia, keep reading. I'm going to explain a different way of thinking about plagiarism than you're probably used to, and I'm going to give you some insight into how we should value the services that academics in the humanities provide you.
My Students Almost Never Plagiarized. Here's Why.
There's probably as much moral outrage connected to plagiarism as there is confusion about what actually constitutes plagiarism. That's not a stable combination. But as a teacher, I rarely had students plagiarize in my classes. This was for three reasons:
- I made them write drafts, sometimes in class, so no one could show up to class with a complete paper out of the thin, blue sky. They'd fail a substantial portion of the paper grade if they did. We also talked explicitly about what plagiarism is, and they knew that part of the reason they were doing drafts was to help them avoid plagiarism. There was no mystery to the process, because I wasn't trying to catch them or trick them.
- I had unique paper prompts that required writers to synthesize and/or address unusual topics and/or incorporate their own experiences. This is the number-one way that teachers can avoid cases of plagiarism. Not having unique assignments that ask students to do something truly unique (like incorporate their personal experiences into their analysis or to analyze things that few other folks would think to analyze) is a good way to avoid getting paper-mill papers.
- I warn students in the first few days of class that I am a rhetorician with enough training in linguistics that I can analyze their rhetorical/linguistic/discursive fingerprints based on samples of their in-class writing and compare that analysis with a similar analysis of any paper they turn in that I think might be plagiarized. Armed with forensic linguistics, I would tell them, I could bring charges of plagiarism that would be pretty hard to deny even in the absence of a matching source if the analysis indicates that plagiarism had, indeed, occurred.
But when I did catch students plagiarizing, it was usually because they were:
- Ignorant about the topic they were to write about. These were the students who'd bailed on class or hadn't done the readings. They were stealing other people's ideas (yeah, I said it: stealing) because they didn't have any of their own to put into words.
- Ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism. Yes, sometimes you have students (especially from foreign cultures) who just don't understand how our culture defines plagiarism, no matter how much we discuss the basics of plagiarism in class. They might not realize that it's not okay to take a sentence from a paper they'd written in high school and plop it into a new paper, or that they have to provide actual citations for all materials--directly quoted or otherwise--that didn't come from their own brains or aren't common knowledge. My response to this was, typically: "Except for common-knowledge issues, if you can cite a source for any idea or words you're writing, then you must."
- Out of time. Maybe they knew the material inside and out. Maybe they knew what plagiarism is. But maybe they put off writing the paper and just don't have the time to write 6000 words in the next 3 hours or whatever before class, so they decide to lift someone else's ideas or words without proper attribution. Yikes. That's why plagiarism penalties exist, indeed.
All of that is understandable, if not always excusable. We hold students to a high standard, and it's our responsibility as teachers to teach students what those standards are so that students can live up to them. We're also here to help them do that "living up to" part, too.
Here's the thing: We cannot do that if we, their teachers, are plagiarists. We have to hold ourselves to the highest standard if we want to be taken seriously.
Who's Afraid of the Humanities?
Nary a month goes by but that there's an op-ed piece in a major newspaper or academic trade publication about how important the humanities are. Ever wondered why that is? It's not as if there are op-eds about how unnecessary the humanities are, right? Well, it's true that after the boom times of the 1990s, university budget cuts struck humanities programs first. These programs weren't flashy (no robots getting built by philosophy professors, even though their work makes AI possible), they didn't get big grant funds (no pharmaceuticals being created by cultural-studies experts, even though their work informs how we categorize disorders and diseases), and they appeared to be more expensive than they were worth (even though some courses, like first-year writing courses, are huge money-makers for universities, largely because they're so cheap to teach and because students are conscripted into them). Right before I went on the job market for a tenure-track job, the economy crashed, and English and other humanities departments around the country dried up. Suddenly, our scholarship wasn't as valuable as it had been; it wasn't worth the same level of investment in the form of professorships and departmental funding. So it goes. The humanities really are vulnerable to the money-focused forces that steer contemporary universities.
The problem isn't that we're not actually valuable. It's also not that we're not inherently valuable, by which I mean that the humanities aren't valuable for their own sake. Humanities scholarship is valuable, and humanities scholars have to be able to articulate the nature of that value in order to persuade others of it. Torrential rainstorms of ink have been spilled in the effort to articulate that value, so I'm going to keep it brief here, but the best reason I can think of to indicate the value of the humanities is this: Imagine that everything we know about human culture didn't get passed down to the next generations. Imagine that in two generations we don't know anything about what we were doing at any point beyond 200 years ago. Imagine that we didn't understand anything about ourselves and how we got to where we are. Sounds dangerous, right? Not to mention wasteful. That's what abandoning the humanities means. We're worth investing time, effort, and, yes, money in.
Self-Plagiarism (Especially in the Humanities) Is Damn Ugly
The following scenario is hypothetical, okay? But let's say that in the course of being the loving, diligent copyeditor of a book written by a group of smart, capable, insightful scholars in the humanities, I see a bit of code that indicates that a few words have come from an online source. I used to see this code in my students' papers all the time when they'd copy and paste a quotation from whatever online source they were reading. With proper attribution, this is not a problem. In fact, with proper attribution, signal phrases, and fully integrating whatever was copied into their ideas and sentences, the inclusion of those outside words--whether they were copied and pasted or not--would constitute successful academic writing. The code in and of itself wasn't the problem for my students.
So let's say I decide, "Well, I better double check that these words don't need to be cited, since they seem to be copied and pasted." Because the words aren't cited. Why would they be copied and pasted, then, I might wonder? Let's say that I then search the interweb for the words, and find that, lo and behold, that exact phrase has already been published in an article on the same topic in a peer-reviewed, academic journal that specializes in publishing information about this topic. Gasp! And not cited?? This is not okay!
What I've just described to you in this hypothetical situation is plagiarism. The author of the chapter hasn't given attribution to the exact wording of a pretty distinctive phrase that comes from another source that, in all likelihood, the author came in contact with in the course of doing research for this article. Standard plagiarism that an editor can query: "Does this sentence require attribution? It comes from an outside source. Please provide complete citation information."
But let's say I look at the byline for the article from which this phrase has been flat-out plagiarized, and I find that the article was written by the same person who's written the chapter that I'm currently copyediting.
Um, no. No, no, no. Say it ain't so. This humanities scholar has self-plagiarized. This person has just repeated themselves verbatim in a totally new work of "scholarship." And, let's go to the worst-case scenario: let's say that this person is a rhetoric-and-composition scholar with a tenure-track position and has even written a textbook about academic writing.
Let's say that happened. Just, like, hypothetically.
This is truly ugly. It's hypocritical. It's professional malpractice. It's self-sabotage. Any humanities scholar, especially someone who specializes in rhetoric and/or writing, has no excuse. They have no appeal to any of the three reasons why students might plagiarize. Let me count the ways:
- Self-plagiarists in the humanities, especially writing-studies specialists, cannot claim ignorance of the subject matter they're writing about. Clearly, as someone who's published on this topic before, they should be able to think of new things to say about this topic. If they can't, they should take several seats and let someone else who has something new and fresh to say have a chance. But this is one of the many problems of the academy today: publish or perish leads to a glut of echo-chamber publications. It leads to cliques of scholars publishing each other's scholarship once one of them gets into an editorial position. Perhaps self-plagiarizing humanities scholars think that no one is actually reading their work, at least not closely, and they'll never get caught. That's woefully abject in its cynicism.
- They cannot claim to be ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism. If you're a professional academic, you've encountered dozens of definitions of plagiarism. It's your job to enforce plagiarism policies in your classes. You can't say that you didn't realize that just repeating your own words and not providing a citation to that information is dishonest. You can't say that you think there's no harm in trying to get ahead in the publish or perish game by cutting corners, by trying to seem as if you've got new, fresh ideas when in fact you're just repeating yourself. This is why outsiders don't take the humanities seriously. Things like this. When we don't actually bring new, worthwhile knowledge to the table. This is why. This.
- They cannot claim to have run out of time. Behind on that deadline? Either ask for an extension or sit down and let someone else have a go. I'm in the middle of an epic battle with myself about whether I'm ever going to get a chapter submitted for a certain edited collection. But I'm not going to steal someone else's words or try to pass off words that I've already published somewhere else in order to have another publication line on my CV. Neither would I steal just one sentence. It's not going to save me that much time. In the time that I saved by not trying to think of a new way to phrase that same idea, I'm not going to be able to fit in another student advising session or another email or another meeting or time enough to prep a whole class, etc. It's not saving that much time to self-plagiarize just one line. So why bother? It's just lazy and ugly, and it suggests that what we do is cheap and not worthy of building upon. It suggests that even we "really" know that what we do is just the same thing over and over. As long as we get the publication glory, right?
So, I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying. If you're a scholar in the humanities and you're thinking of self-plagiarizing, don't. Wait to write when you actually have something new to contribute. Give someone else a chance, if the best you can do is repeat yourself. If we're in this cosmic cocktail party together, then just remember that no one likes to chat up the person who just keeps saying the same thing over and over. What's the point of listening to that?
